None of these representations, whether they are right-wing arguments against tenure, or Hollywood celebrations of Deep Feeling and sometimes short poems, show professors doing the kind of work we do between classes: preparing for those classes by reading, annotating, outlining, and making Power Points;  commenting on student work; constructing syllabi or assignments that must continually be clarified on university classroom software; writing recommendations; arranging, attending or chairing multiple different kinds of meetings about curriculum, promotion, or budget;   holding office hours where the topic is not the student’s cute shoes but more likely their mental health or COVID; advising dissertations; serving on hiring or admission committees;  attending and/or arranging talks, workshops, panels; hosting visitors; assessing courses, programs, or entire academic units; writing long reports;  recruiting students and colleagues.

I have my own nostalgia about Texas that has nothing to do with longhorn cows or the manliness of cowboys, although for the first five years I lived here I was always on the point of buying cowboy boots. When I flew into Houston in the middle of a, well, Texas-sized thunderstorm to take up residence there in 1990, it was a Democratic (and I think a democratic) state. Ann Richards had just been elected governor. During the Republican National Convention that took place in Houston in 1992, the story goes they had to import anti-abortion activists; there was no developed local anti-choice movement. While the Democratic party in Texas tended to be more libertarian than traditionally liberal in its leanings, I took its individualist ethos to be part of a rugged charm I could see in Richards’ swashbuckling self-presentation and hear, in a more traditionally gendered form, in the many folk and country songs about the state—some of which I had already learned long before my plane touched down for the first time at what would become George Bush airport.

The conference itself is both familiar and unfamiliar. The redwoods are there, and the deer, although there are more wild turkeys and no foxes. The place smells the same, of cedar and rosemary and—perhaps you only imagine this—faintly of the ocean with its shock of aquamarine you as you move from the woods to open ground. You gather with the universe participants outside the lecture hall for drinks and decide once again that the t-shirts for sale there will not really fit you. You eat breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria—although this year you make sure always to sit outside, even when in is cold and the fog drips into your morning coffee. You listen to lectures—and give one—schooling yourself to the 50 minutes that seems so short when you are talking and so long when someone else is. Your back hurts  from sitting still in wooden chairs and leaning forward to focus on every word of every lecture. It hurts more every year, as you age, but never as much as it did the first year, when you were pregnant.

The story of my relation to this home team is less conflicted than the ones I offered in the previous posts in this trilogy. This, in spite of, or perhaps, because I like watching basketball less than I like watching baseball or football. The pace of the game can make me anxious, to the point where I cannot listen to games on the car radio for fear of driving off the road at key moments. Since my sons love the game as much or more than they love anything else, it has been, nonetheless, the background rhythm of my life from October to June for the last 27 (or is it only 26?) years. For all of those years, when I walk into my living room at night, there have been tall, beautiful men, running from left to right, and from right to left on my increasingly large tv sets. I read to the swishing of basketball nets, to the voices of Bill Worrell, Calvin Murphy, Matt Bullard, and Julia Morales

In 1973, when Roe v. Wade became law, I was 14 years old. Unlike many of my current friends and colleagues, I did not have to agitate or organize about abortion, or worry that a newfound sexuality would become entangled with fear of back alley procedures or legal retribution. Roe was a gift that arrived just in time for me to begin thinking through my sexuality without terror. By the accident of chronology, I have been protected by Roe for almost all my reproductive life; it has been the invisible net underneath my feet, the just-in-case of my reproductive decisions. While I knew, when I thought of it, to be grateful to the activists, mostly women, who had made this protection possible, and to a culture that seemed—at least occasionally—to be increasingly open to feminist ideas, I sometimes, looking back, took the gift of choice for granted. Coming of age after Roe and before AIDS, I lived through and in what now seems surely to be a golden age of bodily autonomy. The calendar of my lived experience is the calendar of choice in public life.

So, what is the Watson “scandal” I mention as if everyone were as obsessed with it as I am?  As if everyone consumed developments in the case along with their scrambled eggs and spinach?  I feel a need to summarize although the once-local story has gone national not only with two major Sports Illustrated articles, but also with recent in-depth reporting by the New York Times. The short version is that Deshaun Watson, the first supremely talented quarterback in the relatively short history of the Texans, is being sued by atleast (as of this writing) 24 female massage therapists for inappropriate sexual behavior during and in some cases after the massage. Three of these women filed criminal charges; recently a Houston grand jury declined to indict. The complainants represent over a third of the 66 women the New York Times estimates that Watson hired as massage therapists in a 17-month period. Four of them seem to be from a firm with whom the Texans have a contract. Watson contacted the remaining 62 of them online and most on Instagram or other social media.  Although there have been periodic rumors of settlement in the two years in which this story has unfolded, as of today, all the civil suits are still active, with two of them being very recently added.

When I first got a copy of Pearlman’s book, I was afraid to open it; there were surely things in it I did not want to know about players who had so long been part of my mental landscape—and, yes, my emotional life.  I had, by that time, given up on my erstwhile heroes: Lenny Dykstra, Keith Hernandez, even Darryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden. I was not ready, though, to give up on Mookie Wilson, the Mets speedy center fielder. Although his quickness allowed him to make some iconic catches (now, alas, removed from YouTube) some of my happiest memories of the ‘80s (quite a happy decade for me, all told) are of Mookie running the bases. His first step was always deceptively slow; he came out of the batter’s box with something that looked almost like a limp, but that half second of hesitation, of near-clumsiness, was really the sign of gathering himself for speed. Given his history of hamstring injuries, I never stopped worrying about that first seemingly endless moment before he took off so fast you barely had time to enjoy his stolen base or his stretching of a double into a triple.

You have been exposed. The CDC website offers layered guidance for different categories of people in this situation: those that are “not up to date” on their vaccines, those that are, and those that have recently had COVID. The website instructs those in the first, “not up to date,” category that they should quarantine. The word “quarantine” comes with an embedded link. The link does not work.

It is 1980 and I am in my 1973 Dodge Dart Swinger, which/whom I have named Henry, with the enthusiasm of a first-time car owner. All my subsequent cars will be unnamed. My boyfriend, now my husband of 35 years, is driving, in part because I usually prefer not to, and in part because, as he says, he knows the road like the back of his hand. This would be the Valley Road at the Fishing Creek, PA exit of I 83. Scott is going home and bringing me with him. On the map, his family lives in the tiny town of Goldsboro, although the mailing address is an otherwise non-existent “Etters.” In 1980 it is easiest for Scott to say  he comes from somewhere near Harrisburg.

You and your friends, who were your bubble and who are now, in the idiom of restaurant culture, your “dining companions” or even more thrillingly, your “party,” have emerged into the Houston spring. The flowers are blooming, along with the pollen that in past years would have kept you inside. You are a butterfly; you have left behind your chrysalis—or perhaps it is a cocoon; you don’t remember the difference. You wonder if butterflies feel quite as vulnerable as you do on their first flight. Perhaps you are instead a hermit crab caught between shells, naked to the air that might be full of virus that is  masked by the scent of jasmine. But it is not really that the air feels infectious. Rather, it feels, even on this beautiful no-temperature day so rare in Houston, slightly solid, a medium to be negotiated, along with the parking and restaurant reservations.

I don’t remember anything about the student poems at the top of the pile, but one of Forché’s comments burned onto my retina. It went something like this: “Why are you writing about all that food at yuppie restaurants? Write about something important!” Forché had recently published a collection of poems called The Country Between Us, about atrocities in el Salvador. She was a poet of witness,  and wrote about important—and horrifying— things. The mentions of food in The Colonel, perhaps her most famous poem from that volume, have nothing in common with the sun-dried tomatoes, the pink peppercorns, and the angel hair pasta that might have been the subject of student poems of the late eighties. After the speaker shares with the colonel and his wife a dinner of “lamb [and] good wine,” 

But right now, somewhere around 1963, his tools are scattered everywhere.  He is listlessly, aimlessly building a large rectangular box. Listless, because he is slowly recovering from a bout of hepatitis, which may or may not have been exacerbated by his drinking. Aimless because he is letting the wood and the nails and the time of recovery  tell him what to do.  It makes sense given everything about him that he would recover by making something, although, once the rectangle takes shape, he is not sure what it is that he has made. He thinks perhaps it is a toy box for his daughter, although she does not really play too much with toys. As the bright sun of a Roman spring makes its way across the terrace, he feels the box taking a new shape under his hands. The box becomes the first floor of a dollhouse; he adds a second floor with two large rooms, stairs and a hallway leading up to the third floor, two rooms under a hinged roof. As he works, he looks over the cityscape before him—the churches, apartment buildings, and cafes of the Parioli neighborhood where the streets are named after musicians. The street where he lives is named after Gaspare Spontini, a composer so obscure that nobody outside the family can remember the street name. But if he squints, he can see the cobblestones of Piazza Verdi, a satisfyingly famous.

Take measuring spoons for example. Please. I have three sets of them. One is my mother’s old set with the tablespoon missing. One is the kind with slim rectangular spoons that fit into spice jars, and one is a newish round set. The designer of the rectangular set, although fully admirable in the matter of shape, has made the to me inexplicable choice of including not just the ¼,  ½, and full teaspoons, but also ¾ of a teaspoon and oh-so-weirdly half a tablespoon, which as far as I am concerned is not a quantity. The sheer number of options interrupts what one bread-baking video I watched called, surprisingly, “my library of gestures”: in this case, the quick flipping of spoons and the identification of the correct one I can achieve even in the dark, when the lights go out or at a campsite in a windstorm.

The car is her sanctuary. She opens the door and experiences a familiar mixture of relief and fear. She remembers as she always does stories of rapists crouching in the back seat of cars, waiting until the driver turns her back to spring. Some days she checks the backseat with her flashlight, some days she throws her bag of books over her shoulder to see if it hits anyone. Tonight, she doesn’t want to know. She wishes she could pee into a bottle the way her brother and father do on their fishing trips.

Last week, my perennial coauthor, Robyn Warhol, came to visit me so we could work together on a joint paper to be delivered in early March at the annual Northeast Victorian Society (NAVSA) conference, recently, alas, demoted from an in-person event in my beloved Vancouver to a remote one. Robyn’s and my more intimate two-person/in-person meeting allowed us to revisit an idea we have worked on and named together: “synchronic reading.” This idea begins with the well-known fact that many, perhaps most, Victorian novels were initially published in serial form, where parts appeared monthly or weekly in magazines or otherwise in free-standing “part issues.” Dickens is the author most persistently associated with the latter form; although he wrote for and edited magazines, he revolutionized the popularity of the part issue.

More than most other images in Patty Carroll’s photographic series “Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise,”  this feels like a still from a movie or a narrative painting. The pictured scene freezes on the edge of disaster: the pots are about to topple, the rolling pin about the roll, the woman perhaps about to kill herself. Carroll explains that the archetypal woman in this series “becomes the victim of domestic disasters. Her activities, obsessions and objects are overwhelming her. Her home has become a site of tragedy. The scenes of her heartbreaking end are loosely inspired by several sources including the game of Clue, where murder occurs in one of five rooms of the house: Dining Room, Kitchen, Hall, Conservatory, and Library.” 

In the Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, the heroine finds herself in the upscale London flat of her sometimes-boyfriend, Mark Darcy, named after the hero of Pride and Prejudice, as Fielding updates Austen’s romance plots for a new century. Like Pemberley, Mark Darcy’s home overwhelms the heroine with signs of wealth. Unlike Pemberley, the flat is not simply an object of desire. Alone chez Mark, Bridget worries that Mark is growing cold to her, an emotional temperature she sees reflected in his enormous and impersonal kitchen where she has to navigate “baffling walls of stainless steel” in order to identify the fridge and to satisfy the hunger pangs that makes her a heroine as relatable in her way as Elizabeth Bennet is in hers. In the film adaptation the steel appliances wink under harsh lighting that also reflects the white walls. 

The film resists this geography, these politics, and this narrative in two opposite ways: first by refusing the specific and then by flamboyantly embracing it. In the story of Disney’s Encanto there are no directional signs, no maps, no points of the compass. In the confusion of the first first scene, we do not know where these refugees are coming from, or where they are going. It is a border crossing without borders. This does not, of course mean that the film does not have a sense of place: quite the contrary. It just means that the place is magic. The film borrows from the Latin American literary tradition of magical realism, committed to a description and honoring of everyday life that its unbounded by the probable.

What remains real, what remains bodily, for you and for your staff is the labor involved in doing and undoing. Every event comes with its own digital shadow and with the work of translation, where the work of unmaking is infinitely more tiring that the work of setting up. All the dispiriting work is made possible—and, it seems, inevitable—by hope, a hope that takes the form of a fantasy calendar. Surely, you say to yourself, two weeks from now, next semester, in 2022, we will be able to have our gatherings, our spirited interpersonal exchanges, our stuffed mushrooms and our warm white wine? And now it is two weeks from now, it is next semester, it is, improbably, 2022 and it is once again time to cancel and transform.

This imaginary room in a Victorian brothel is one version of a home without books. The homes of some of my childhood friends were others. And here, my mother played, dare I say it, the part of the speaker of “Jenny.” “No books,” she would say, shaking her head. “Not one, “I would say, or sometimes, somehow, even more smugly, “only coffee table books.” My head shake would mirror my mother’s. Pity, superiority, complacency yes, of course. Also, a genuine love of books, a desire to sort people and things into binaries, and a reliance on what I have called the home/owner metonymy by which we have learned to judge (that is to say, “read”) people by the places they live.